[Bf-committers] Blender developer meeting minutes, July 10 2011

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi all,

Here's the summary of today's meeting topics:

1) Blender 2.58+

- Sergey mentioned a serious Text object render error has been fixed.  
Gives bad normals for bevels in cases.

- Bug tracker still at 165 open reports. Never spoiled time to check,  
please help!
   http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?atid=498&group_id=9&func=browse

- Reminder: Dalai Felinto works on removal of "Texture Face":
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Dfelinto/TexFace
http://codereview.appspot.com/4289041/

- FFmpeg 0.8 upgrade is unsure... Sergey and Dalai had serious  
regressions with it. Peter Schlaile thinks it could work, he'll check  
on that now.

- Mingw compiling: note we only support the official MingW version,  
not the 'tdm builds'. Opencollada library has been compiled for it,  
OpenEXR coming soon.

- Schedule is still to target a 2.59 release for Siggraph, early  
august. Keymap issue still is being targeted to be solved for that.

2)

- New Boolean Modifier using Carve library: works very fast and  
interactive. Error handling needs some work... the cases it can't  
handle returns empty or original meshes ('flickers' during transforms  
then). Sergey or Campbell check on moving branch to trunk, #ifdeffed  
out as compile option for further tests.
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/branches/carve_booleans

- Discussions on Blender's hair system & particles and particle-nodes  
haven't lead to conclusions yet. Janne confirmed a couple of days  
he'll check on feasibility of keeping hair work with new 'paged  
particles' code.

- Ton proposes to define this work as a target for next open movie &  
funding. A lot of this is related to how dependencies of Blender's  
data and animation systems work. Or to name it more exact, we need a  
new depsgraph that allows threaded handling of animsys, modifiers,  
derivedmesh, proxies, duplicators, particles, hair, softbody, cloth,  
fluid etc... and preferably noodable as well!
A possibility is to reserve the first (2) months of Mango in Blender  
Institute for it, flying in developers to first tackle this topic  
before the artists come in for the actual film work.

3) Google Summer of Code

- Midterm evaluation is soon, all students should have been in contact  
with mentors about it.

- Tomato branch (motion tracking) has great visual progress already  
with several videos posted.
Ton suggests to all students to also make a midterm progress video,  
will be great for getting awareness and feedback. Videos will be  
collected and posted next week.

Thanks,

-Ton-

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Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands